


How Does Your Garden Grow?

by kurage_hime



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Flirting, Modern University Setting, References to Aztec Religion & Lore, Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-06 02:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15876510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurage_hime/pseuds/kurage_hime
Summary: A frustrated agricultural scientist encounters an Aztec goddess in a field of maize.





	How Does Your Garden Grow?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Isis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/gifts).



Dr. Mary McGillicuddy cast a weary, frustrated eye over her experimental cornfield. It didn’t take an expert to see that rows 3, 5, and 8 weren’t doing well: The plants were stunted, their leaves drooping, their stems thin and practically brittle. The rest of the rows were all but dead at this stage. The control row, however, was doing just fine.

_Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow?_

“My garden’s not growing well. Not well at all,” Mary muttered.

Christ, how she used to hate that nursery rhyme, used to loathe how her age mates back in England would chant it whenever they wanted to mock her bookish, brusque demeanor. What would those children say, she wondered, if they could see her now?

And speaking of children—? Argh, was that laughter she heard coming from one of the distant rows?! It must be the new postdoc’s daughter.

“Hey, you know you shouldn’t be playing in there!” Mary called out.

No response. Just silence. Now she was probably hiding in among the rows somewhere, waiting for Mary to leave. It figured. That’s what happened when children got caught out.

Mary sighed and ran one hand through her hair in frustration. What did it matter? Let the girl have her fun. This round of experiments was an abject failure anyway, back to the office to write up the record of her latest, agonizing failure—

“Want some flowers?”

Mary blinked. She could’ve sworn the little girl with the fistful of wildflowers hadn’t been standing right in front of her a second ago…but whatever.

“Why, thank you. That is very kind,” Mary said with exaggerated formality as she accepted the bouquet. It was genuinely pretty and ought to look nice in her office.

The little girl giggled, pleased with herself, dashed back into the cornfield, and promptly disappeared.

Yes, Mary decided, that must be the new postdoc’s daughter. Coffee-brown skin and long black hair. She had the most remarkable hazel eyes, though—irises that glinted with the mellow gold of ripe sweet corn.

 

* * *

 

In Northern England, where Mary had been born and raised, the word “corn” referred to wheat. But here in Iowa, where she’d spent the last decade and a half pursuing a career in agricultural science research, “corn” meant one thing and one thing only: maize.

First domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico approximately 10,000 years ago, maize was one of the world’s most important cereal crops. Dr. Mary McGillicuddy had made a name for herself in the development of new varieties of maize – new drought- and pest-resistant varieties poised to meet the challenges of 21st century climate change in particular. She did this by crossing common varieties with the diverse plentitude of “landraces” still grown by the peoples of southern Mexico.

Now, she was aiming to build upon those earlier successes by developing a commercially viable variety of maize which required less fertilizer. Imagine, a cereal crop which could fix its own nitrogen! This had existed for time immemorial in southern Mexico, but it took eight months to grow, and that was much too slow for Iowa, where fields could be blighted by frost as late as April and as early as September.

Mary had spent the last two weeks straight analyzing and reanalyzing and re-reanalyzing her data. Yet she couldn’t understand why she’d been stymied in her progress at every turn.

Argh, this was so frustrating! She pushed her chair back from her desk, stretched, and groaned, long and loud. The sudden motion knocked the vase of wildflowers from her desk.

“Oh, for the love of—!”

The vase had shattered into unsalvageable shards of ceramic, and the water from the vase had drenched her latest batch of notes. They also proved unsalvageable.

“I guess this is the universe telling me I ought to take a break, eh? Time to go for a walk and take in some fresh air, I suppose,” Mary remarked to nobody in particular as she tossed the shards of vase and the wildflowers into her rubbish bin.

Damn, but it was a shame about those flowers. They’d kept their bloom for nearly two weeks. Hmm. They must’ve liked living in her office or something.

 

* * *

 

Mary’s mouth dropped open when she saw her experimental cornfield. She was struck dumb.

The maize plants in rows 3, 5, and 8 had grown over ten feet tall, and their leaves were so lustrously green that they were nearly _black_. The aerial roots with which they fixed nitrogen from the air were a bright rhubarb red and dripping with mucilage.

“Want some more flowers?”

It was the postdoc’s daughter again. She was grinning from ear to ear.

“Um, yeah, sure…” Mary said absentmindedly.

“You like?” the little girl asked.

“Um, yeah, sure…” Mary said again, her mind already fixating on the mystery of this apparent miracle maize. How in the hell had this happened? She’d been so sure that her crossbreeds were – once more – failing to thrive. She’d been ready to abandon the field altogether for the rest of the season. What was different this time around? What had changed?

It didn’t occur to Mary until much, much later that the little girl had been asking her opinion on the _cornfield_ , not the wildflowers.

 

* * *

 

They knew the once-in-a-thousand-years-flood was coming. The latest updates blared from every television, radio, and internet channel; a statewide State of Emergency had been declared. Upriver, grand monuments to humanity’s hubris were being smashed by raging torrents like so much flimsy bric-a-brac. Yet, somehow, when the Iowa River overflowed its banks, the university just wasn’t ready. Not really. Was it really possible to prepare for this manner of catastrophe?

Mary’s experimental cornfield was on the floodplain, and she was out there against the advice of Health & Safety, in among those glorious rows of toweringly tall stalks, desperately harvesting as many ears of corn as she could before the river swept the literal fruits of her research away.

She heard the water coming before she saw it.

The last thing Mary remembered was the childish laughter of the postdoc’s daughter…and a shield made of honeyed sunlight that wrapped itself around her body like unopened flower petals around a bud.

 

* * *

 

“I brought you some flowers.”

Mary turned her head toward the direction of that declaration with a soft groan of effort. Weren’t the hospital’s visiting hours over already? What with the chaos left in the wake of the river overflowing its banks, she hadn’t realized anyone even knew she was here in hospital.

She’d awakened yesterday with seven broken bones, practically a full-body cast, and no memory of the precise circumstances of her injuries or her rescue. What with the influx of new patients in need of emergency care, the doctors and nurses had been too busy to proffer answers to any of Mary’s poorly formulated questions.  

And now, a slender young woman was standing at Mary’s bedside. She had coffee-brown skin and long black hair, and she was radiantly beautiful. If asked, Mary would have sworn she’d never laid eyes upon this young woman before.

“I brought you some flowers,” the young woman repeated. She held out a bouquet of wildflowers expectantly.

It may have been because she was hurting, or maybe the drugs she was being fed through the IV weren’t doing their job properly, but whatever the reason, at the moment Mary was feeling quite contrary. “I’d rather have my research seed corn. The entire harvest was lost to the flood,” she groused. “All that time and energy and hard work! Wasted! You know, sometimes I think” – yep, Mary was on a real tear now – “sometimes I think that I should just give up and call it quits—”

“I can help with that too,” the young woman interrupted.

“Sometimes, I…I…” Mary’s contrary rant stuttered to an abrupt halt. “What did you say?”

“I said I can help with that too.” The bouquet disappeared from the young woman’s hand – sleight of hand? – and when she opened her fist there was a handful of dry seed corn in her palm.

Mary blinked. Stared at the corn. Shifted her gaze to the young woman’s face. “W-who…?”

“I’m called Chicomecōātl. Sometimes Xilonen.” Aztec names? Mary’s brow furrowed in confusion. The young woman noticed, smiled, and laughed. Her laughter sounded like a child’s. “But _you_ can call me anything you want.”

When young woman called Chicomecōātl or Xilonen or whatever leaned over to kiss Mary – on the lips! with nips of teeth and teasing, tantalizing tip of tongue! – Mary noticed that her eyes were a remarkable color:

The mellow gold of ripe sweet corn.


End file.
